Offmessage

My Mum’s only comment about The Big Lebowski was “they don’t half swear a lot”. Fucking-A, Mum, fucking-A.

…and sad. Hotwired is dead.

Has it really come to this? Shite popstars using cricket (cricket, for God’s sake) to promote their latest pap. I mean really.

With the births of Amy and Irie Claire hasn’t been up to much RFID stuff for the last few years. It’s moved on a bit….

HP today announced an innovation that may someday give RFID a run for its money. The company is touting its “Memory Spot” as a new wireless chip capable of “linking the digital and physical worlds.” The devices, which measure 2 mm to 4 mm square, complete with an antenna, offer transfer rates of 10 megabits per second – faster than Bluetooth. Like passive RFID, the chips are powered by radio signals emitted from a reader.

A very well intentioned piece over at InfoWorld by Matt Assay ruminating on the lack of a recommendations engine for Open Source software. I was with him for a while, until his last paragraph:

The record labels – bless ‘em! – perform the music selection and promotion process reasonably well. Surely a software analog is ready to be born….

Er… Surely that’s Microsoft, Oracle, CA, Apple and the like isn’t it?

Clearly if I’d got my wallet out of my pocket and signed up as a subscriber I’d know what Operation Depth Charge is… But I didn’t, and now that last.fm has gone offline with a tantalising message I’m all a-quiver… For those that care it would appear that the track posting is still working fine, so more than likely no track plays will be lost; it’s just the web site and query web services that are offline at the moment.

…says he hopefully. El Reg puts some very persuasive analysis behind the recent Home Office comments and comes to the conclusion that UK ID cards are dead. I’m crossing my fingers they’re right, although a large part of me thinks that this Prime Minister is mad enough and arrogant enough to keep going regardless.

Interesting. We all know traditional media is in decline, so it’s not a great surprise that last week was the least watched week in (US) TV history when you think about it, but… It’s still a stark reminder that things are changing, and quite rapidly at that.

I’m a puzzle nut. I can’t help it. My brain is just wired that way. When Sudoku first appeared I was really excited; an apparently complex logic puzzle in a very compact format – it looked right up my street. The fun in these things for me is discovering the rules by which they are solved, and Sudoku looked like there would be a fairly complex ruleset attached.

Frankly I was surprised and disappointed when it turned out that there are only 2 rules, and with the application of those 2 rules the problem is solved – every time, even the most fiendish. I stopped doing them when I realised that. All it became was a ball ache of concentration and repetition, rather than an intellectual challenge. What amazes me is the number of people who still do them. What amazes me more is pages like this one that apparently reveal “secret methods”.

Do the vast majority of people that do Sudoku *not* know these rules? The comments on the post suggest that people indeed do not. How on earth do they ever finish the puzzle without driving themselves batty?

This is no real surprise, but these leaked emails from inside the Home Office show the tizz the civil servants responsible are getting themselves into…